A pot that is hot (6)

Forget Bodyguard or Strictly or Grumbleton Glump, or whatever it is you people are watching these days.

The best programmes on British TV at the moment are 1986 episodes of Top of the Pops on BBC4, and old Coronation Street on ITV3. No arguments, please, this really is as good as it gets.

Yes, it's a Hotpot!

If you haven't caught up with Old Corrie, we're in about mid-1990 now, a few months after Alan Bradley got killed by the tram, and probably a year or so before Alec Gilroy's fit granddaughter shows up and is sullied by Andy McDonald.

But we get two episodes every day from a era when they were broadcast at a rate of two per week, so that 'year' will pass by pretty quickly. And there's still a long, long way to go before it descends into an unwatchable retirement home for actors who can't get any other work.

Be transported back to a simpler time. A better time. A time when people were still with us.

Transitional Lamb

If you were planning to check some news site or other after reading this post, I'll save you the trouble.

Snow.

Snow. Snow. Snow. 

Lots of snow. It's cold out there, the schools are closed, the footies off and some opticians are trapped on the M75 for 137 hours in an Austin Princess with no heating, blankets or wine. That sort of thing. And there's absoluely fuck-all else going on in the news. Trust me on this one.
 
I think we're on an 'Amber' weather warning right now - Red basically means that you and everyone you ever cared about are already dead, while the Yellow warning just means you have to watch out for uriney snow. so Amber is probably about right.

The curry of my youth - Lamb Tikka Rogan

Back in the 80s, the longest shadow hanging over the world was the hole in the Ozone layer. Then it was Third World Debt, then the Banking Crisis.

Now it's Shit Takeaways.

I used to be staunchly of the opinion that any curry cooked at home would never be quite as good as the equivalent dish from your local Tandoori restaurant. They had the specialist equipment; The spices you can't buy anywhere without being in the know; The proper Tandoor oven.

Now I'm not so sure - while there are some perfectly good places plying their trade in the 21st century marketplaces of Just Eat and HungryHouse, there are also some right munters, pigstrotters and tugboats out there. (If you accept that these terms can apply as equally to shit takeaways as they might to someone picked up in a shit nightclub before picking up a shit takeaway!)

London's best shawarma is BACK!!!

Late night takeaways are a fact of life.

We've all eaten our share of dodgy fried chicken and toilet-grade kebabs when stricken with ferocious hunger pangs shortly after leaving the pub. Beer can do that to you.

Got a much better takeaway than the man on the bus

Perhaps the only real downside of the longer opening hours we've enjoyed for some years now is that most of the food options available at chucking-out time are invariably dire.

Well, almost invariably dire. There are, believe it or not, a few very special places where you can actually get something decent to eat at 12:37 AM. 

Food fit for Commoners

You probably haven't failed to notice that there's an Election coming up this week.

Who are you voting for?

Actually, if you live round here, you might very well have failed to notice. In this ultra-safe Labour seat they could, and often do, stick a red rosette on a steaming dogturd and it would still romp home with a huge majority, so nobody is bothering to make much of an effort.
 

As far as the wider electoral picture goes I shall, of course, be rooting for the Tories and hoping for the best, but I'm not at all confident now. We're almost certainly heading for abject constitutional carnage for various regrettable reasons that I won't go into here - I'm well aware that the stuff that fascinates politicos like myself is more of a turn-off to most people than the sight and aroma of a steaming dogturd with a red rosette on it.

Anyway, one of the advantages of an Election campaign is that the house isn't sitting, and that means that ordinary folk like you and I get a rare opportunity to see a bit more of the innards of our parliament than we normally would.

Places like the Members' Dining Room, which I visited last week, fulfilling a long-held wish.

Utterly Paphotic

Having an e-Passport is great.

It means you can breeze through immigration at Gatwick in no time, whilst pointing and laughing at the suckers in the lengthy queue with their manual passports.

'So long, losers!' you get to say, as you merrily scan your way across the border and into the Arrivals Wetherspoons.

Of course, as the new e-passports are phased in, the balance will shift. Soon we'll start seeing queues, and then they'll be the same length as the non-e queues. One day the last remaining people with old fashioned documents will be having the last laugh when 99% of us are waiting in line to scan.

But for now, it's the golden age of the electonric passport, and I fully intend to savour the schadenfreude.

Just desserts?

If the best starter I've eaten this year was the foie gras at the Gay Hussar, then the best dessert I've had must surely be...

Well, let's begin at the beginning, shall we?

This week my Royal British Legion colleagues and I celebrated the public launch of our MoneyForce programme with a post-launch lunch and were keen to try somewhere new and different, near the office in the Borough area.

The rooftop take on shabby chic?

And so we found The Rooftop Cafe @ The Exchange in London Bridge street.

Merely finding it is a challenge in itself as it's extremely well hidden.

One has to go into a fairly nondescript office building next door to 'All Bar One', up a couple of floors in a lift (or take the stairs as I did), then ascend several more flights of rather shabby, fire-escapey stairs before finally arriving in the loft space where you'll find the Rooftop Cafe - an open kitchen, a few tables and one private dining room where our table was waiting for us.

I try not to be swayed by the fickleness of first impressions, but getting into the place isn't a red carpet experience - it all feels sort of unfinished right now. By the Summer there will be a proper outdoor rooftop bit which will increase their capacity, and being so close to the Shard, you can see where they think the money is.

That does rely on people actually being able to find the place though.

The delights of Leather Lane

Some people give up stuff for Lent. Alcohol… meat… wanking… whatever.

My Lenten fasting tactics usually involving giving up something but relapsing half-way through, thus showing myself to be a man of admirable intention but with no pretensions to divinity. To try nobly and fail with serenity is the human condition after all.

Either that or I’ll wait until Passiontide or thereabouts, figure out something I just happen to have failed to consume during Lent, and retrospectively decide to give that up, with the finishing line only being a matter of days away.

And that’s not cheating, it’s just being clever.

Moussakettes

‘Tis strange how some recipes find themselves being invented.

Take our national dish, Chicken Tikka Masala for example – apparently devised on the spot after a customer asked where the sauce was for his (dry) Tandoori chicken.

Consider also the enormous impact the Earl of Sandwich has had, just by asking for some meat in between slices of bread when he didn’t have time to eat a full lunch.

And let’s not forget Sugar Puffs, which appeared completely by accident in 1802 when a colony of mad bees swarmed into a field and started trying to impregnate grains of wheat.

Actually one of those isn’t true. But this story is. Read on, Macduff: